Organizing Ideas

TODAY BY NUMBERS:

Total number of words on The Language of the Unheard: 52,251 (yeah, I haven't worked on it at all)

Rejections of Finding Innisburg: 0

Books read in the last week: 9.25

Entries into the library's drawing for a Kindle: 3


Well, first off, for anyone who has been keeping track, I passed my state nursing assistant exam on Thursday, so I'm officially a CNA.  Yay!

So today I want to talk about organizing.  Yeah.  I know.  Writers are not really known for their organizational skills, but I have finally won the battle against the random scribblings on pieces of paper and it's all thanks to Microsoft OneNote.  Here's what I do; feel free to share your own triumphs or struggles below.

I have a OneNote notebook entitled "Writing Info."  Into this notebook I throw everything I think might ever possibly be useful in a book.  I have tabs across the top that are labeled:  Writing Tips, Novel Ideas, Short Story Ideas, Characters, Tidbits, Settings, Screenplay Ideas, and Contests. 

Some of them are pretty self-explanatory, but I think my favorite one is Writing Tips.  I love to read writing "how-to" books and articles, and often a sentence or an idea will catch my attention, so I just copy and paste it right into that section.  The section is divided into various pages: characters, plotting, outlining, etc. and I just stick it where it belongs.  Then, when I'm brainstorming ideas for a new book, I read through all the ideas, incorporating each into my book.  I sincerely believe doing this has greatly increased my writing abilities and I would highly recommend it to anyone.

In the tab labeled "Tidbits" I just put interesting things that I run across that aren't going to turn into a stand-alone book or story (probably).  Right now in there I have a link to the Wikipedia article on numbers stations (which, even though they've been used in Lost, are really interesting), a quote I once read in a tabloid article about Johnny Depp that I felt would be perfect for a character to say someday, a few ideas for titles that have no stories to go with them, and on and on.  Someday I feel sure I'll find a home for them.

The rest of the tabs house pretty much what you'd expect, and I suspect, if I were to combine them all, that I have over a hundred separate ideas and thoughts in there, not counting the several hundred writing tips I have accumulated. 

So tell me, how do you organize your ideas and thoughts for future books or stories?

Short Stories and Organizing

So I'm still about halfway through "The Language of the Unheard" and while I'm wrapping that up, I've decided to try my hand at some short stories. I haven't written many short stories since high school, where I used to write them almost exclusively. I've heard they're a good way to get your foot in the door and if you get them published in a magazine, they might even make you a little cash!

So my first one is entitled "The Banks of Belronan" and it is a classic tragic romance about selkies, the mythical seal women of Ireland. I'm writing as a frame story with an old woman telling a tale she was told as a child. We'll see how it turns out.

I also finally organized all my little scribblings of story ideas and tidbits into Microsoft OneNote and I feel so much better now. I had to go through two notebooks, the notes section of my phone and countless random pieces of paper to find them all, but they're all sorted by type into the one program now. There's places for me to add more notes to them later on and pictures of things that inspired me etc. I am including an amazing picture of the Aurora Borialis that just keeps me in awe. Anyway, now I don't have to worry about losing things and when I want to find an idea for a story, I just have one place to look. In fact, the selkie story was one that I had thought of a while back and forgotten about until I did this.

Aaron is going camping with his brothers for a few days next week so I'll have to house to myself. I plan on eating lots of cheese-filled foods (he's lactose intolerant but I love cheese), doing a lot of writing, staying up ridiculously late, sleeping in, and watching plenty of chick flicks.